All Rise...

The Charge

"Oh, the misery, the exquisite tragedy, the Susan Hayward of it
all!"—Rupert Everett, My Best Friend's Wedding

Opening Statement

Although she is often remembered for her roles in weepers (as shown by the
quote above), the beautiful and talented Susan Hayward brought her considerable
acting ability to an impressive range of films. This DVD release from VCI Home
Video doesn't display her comedic talents, but otherwise it ably shows off her
versatility with two films from the late '40s: Smash-Up: The Story of a
Woman (1947), for which Hayward garnered a well-deserved Oscar nomination
for her portrayal of a singer who slips into alcoholism, and Tulsa
(1949), a sprawling Technicolor drama about oil barons, cattle ranchers, and the
fiery redheaded woman who bridges the two societies. Hayward appears at the peak
of her beauty in these two films and is in full command of her acting powers.
For both Hayward's followers and those who want to learn more about this fine
actress's body of work, this is a good place to start—handkerchiefs
optional.

Facts of the Case

Smash-Up opens on the bandaged face of Angie (Hayward), who lies
injured and delirious in a hospital bed. The disaster she has recently undergone
turns her thoughts backward, and we go back in time to see how her life came to
this dire pass. Years ago Angie was a promising young singer, and with the help
of Mike, her family friend and mentor (Charles D. Brown), she was poised for
great success. Instead, Angie throws aside her own career to marry aspiring
singer Ken Conway (Lee Bowman, Love
Affair), giving him encouragement, sound business advice, and a baby
daughter. With Angie's support and the songwriting talents of his friend Steve
(Eddie Albert, Roman Holiday), Ken
breaks into the big time and becomes a wealthy, popular performer.

His success, however, leaves Angie feeling tangential to his life. She also
begins to worry that the lovely and efficient secretary, Martha (Marsha Hunt,
The Valley of Decision), has usurped her place by Ken's side. Although
loyal Steve understands Angie's fears and urges Ken to be more caring toward
her, his good advice goes unheeded. As Angie's insecurities lead her to become
more and more dependent on alcohol, she may end up fulfilling her own fears by
driving Ken away…and losing her baby daughter as well.

In Tulsa, which takes place in the 1920s, Hayward plays the
delightfully named Cherokee "Cherry" Lansing, feisty daughter of an
Oklahoma cattle rancher. When an accident at the nearby Tanner oil company
causes her father's death, Cherry determines to ruin Bruce Tanner (Lloyd
Gough)—by competing with him in his own industry. With the financial and
emotional support of her late father's overseer, Jim Redbird (Pedro Armendariz,
From Russia with Love),
Cherry builds an oil rig and starts drilling. When handsome young engineer Brad
Brady (Robert Preston, The Music Man) arrives uninvited to criticize her
operation, sparks fly between him and Cherry, and she takes him on as business
partner…and, pretty soon, fiancé.

Thanks largely to Brady's advice, Cherry strikes oil, and she's soon on her
way to becoming one of the wealthiest women in Oklahoma. With Brady's help, she
builds an oil empire to rival Tanner's. But revenge is no longer her motive:
Ambition now drives Cherry onward, even when it means collaborating with Tanner,
betraying Redbird's trust, and possibly even losing Brady's love.

The Evidence

Apart from their leading lady, producer (Walter Wanger), and director (Stuart
Heisler), these two films don't have much in common. But that actually works to
the advantage of this two-film set, since the contrast in tone and story
prevents overkill. Smash-Up is a sobering (no pun intended) drama that
takes a serious look at alcoholism and some of its causes, whereas the big,
colorful Tulsa, somewhat prefiguring George Stevenson's Giant, combines soap operatics with
near-epic sweep—as well as some overt lessons about greed, conservation,
and appreciating one's local oil barons. If Smash-Up, the superior of the
two films, had been paired with another such heavy drama—say, I Want to Live!—the double dose might
have left the viewer sunk in gloom. With this combination, the viewer can follow
up the more serious film with the relatively lightweight one.

Smash-Up is a powerful portrayal of a woman's decline, remarkable not
just for its understanding attitude toward alcoholism but for its subversive
message about the role of wives and mothers. Angie did all the right things,
according to the code of womanhood usually set forth in films: She sacrificed
her career for the sake of her husband and child. But the film breaks tradition
by telling us that this might not have been the right choice after all. Early in
the film, Mike sorrowfully tells Angie that "you belong in the
profession…I hate to see a really promising career interfered with."
Mike is a credible and respected figure in the film—a father figure, in
fact, for Angie—but instead of listening to him, she reiterates the party
line that her marriage and her husband's career are more important. Angie does
what movies to this point have told us is the proper thing, but in giving up the
self-respect that her career could have brought her, she has signed on for years
of heartache. We can see all the good qualities Angie still possesses, and when
she needs to rise to an occasion—whether to care for her sick baby or to
attempt a career comeback—she can find the strength to go without
drinking. But when her insecurities are exacerbated, as they often are by the
cool, poised Martha (who is herself in love with Ken), she falls back on the
dangerous solace of drinking.

What's almost more astonishing for a film of this era is that her
husband—prosperous, faithful, hard-working—is given much of the
blame for her drinking. In a striking speech late in the film, a doctor explains
to Ken where he went wrong: "With all the best intentions in the world, men
like you make their wives idle, useless. You give them servants to clean their
houses, nurses to take care of their children, and then you say to them: 'Now
you have everything you want. Sit there and enjoy it.'" Ken, of course, was
showing his love for his wife by giving her servants, nice clothes, a fancy
house (decorated, however, by Martha), and the gift of being at loose ends. He,
too, did all the "right" things—except for giving his wife the
gift of his presence and his emotional support. Smash-Up shows the
increasing prosperity of the postwar period and prefigures the domestic life of
the 1950s, when more and more wives might begin to feel loneliness and ennui
during the days they spent in immaculate living rooms while their prosperous
husbands were out earning their keep. The film's depiction of the breakdown of
their marriage is simply chilling: Ken is revolted by his wife's drunkenness and
speaks cruelly toward her when he can bring himself to speak to her at all. The
film movingly shows us just how deeply this hurts the already fragile Angie;
Hayward's performance is so believable and so rife with pain that it's actually
difficult to watch at times. The film ends up sending some surprising messages:
Husbands need to provide more than financial security for their wives; devoting
oneself only to being a wife and mother may be damaging to a woman's emotional
health; and maybe, just maybe, some women truly need careers. These are
pretty revolutionary ideas for the domestically minded postwar period.

In contrast, Tulsa reminds us of all the things that can go wrong
when a woman does have a career. As Cherry becomes more ambitious and
singleminded in her determination to become a big oil baroness, she and Brady
invert the usual gender roles: Cherry is the career-minded partner, constantly
putting off marriage with Brady for business reasons, whereas Brady is the moral
center of the couple, reminding Cherry of the importance of preventing her oil
industry from endangering the grassland and the livelihoods of ranchers like Jim
Redbird. Cherry's drive to succeed at any cost and the gradual wearing down of
the noble Redbird eventually come together in disaster, resulting in a
spectacular scene depicting a massive fire among the oil rigs.

Although Hayward's role in Tulsa is less complex and moving than that
in Smash-Up, the feisty Cherry is without competition as the most
charismatic character in the film. Hayward is the perfect choice to bring to
life Cherry's "wildcat" nature: When she lets out a wild war whoop,
she puts her whole self into it. The men in her life can't help but seem bland
next to the powerful force of her personality. Pedro Armendariz has fine screen
presence, but he is restricted by the conventions of his "noble
Indian" role. Even Preston, usually such a roguishly energetic actor in his
youth, all too soon takes on the function of wet blanket. His opening scene
shows him at his best, in a high-spirited fist fight with one of Cherry's
employees. Chill Wills, who plays Cherry's cousin Pinky and sings the title
song, also serves as narrator for the film. Strangely, his narration frames this
rootin'-tootin' movie as something akin to a public service announcement. Oil
barons used to be rapacious and exploitative, Pinky informs us, but thanks to
good people like Brady, we now have more widely spaced oil wells! This
history-lesson flavor is weirdly at odds with the colorful action and big
emotions of the film itself.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

Consistent with other VCI releases I have seen, the audiovisual quality of
the films on this disc is fair to poor. The black-and-white Smash-Up has
a smeary, blurred picture, and the Technicolor Tulsa, while presenting
the colors boldly, is riddled with grain and loses all detail in dark areas of
the picture. Both show dirt and age-related wear. The mono audio track for both
films is likewise accompanied by hiss and tinniness; the audio is often out of
synch with lip movement in Tulsa. The included extras are essentially a
token gesture: News footage from 1949 does nothing to illuminate the 1949 film,
Tulsa, especially as it is set almost three decades earlier, and the
trailer for Smash-Up is of deplorable visual quality and ends so abruptly
that I suspect it to be incomplete.

A much less serious objection, but one I will mention nonetheless, is the
tireless (or tiresome) repetition in Smash-Up of the same three songs.
With most of the main characters involved in the business of making music, there
are naturally going to be a great many musical scenes, but three songs that
represent pivotal moments in Angie's life are repeated to an almost laughable
extent, which undermines the dramatic intensity of the story.

Closing Statement

Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman is a must-see for fans of Hayward or of
Eddie Albert, who turns in a strong supporting performance. (Albert's character
is so much more appealing than Bowman's that I wished for the film to buck
convention and allow the heroine to dump her stiff of a husband and hook up with
his sympathetic best friend.) Its depiction of alcoholism is remarkably
insightful for its day, and all the more powerful because of the paucity of
treatment options it reveals for the time. Overall, despite some little dips
into melodramatic excess, it's a riveting drama. On the other hand, I wouldn't
call Tulsa compulsive viewing, but it will have great appeal for those
who enjoy the spectacle and scope of golden-age Technicolor dramas. Due to the
weak audiovisual transfer, though, its value as a spectacle is greatly
diminished, which viewers should keep in mind when considering a purchase.

The Verdict

Susan Hayward has suffered enough and is free to go. VCI Home Video is
sentenced to probation for their substandard presentation of these films.